by Anne Rice
It was not that the memories weren't vivid. They were. Like yesterday, it seemed, that he had watched them carry the coffin of Cleopatra out of the mausoleum and down to the Roman cemetery by the sea. He could smell that sea again if he wanted to. He could hear the weeping all around him. He could feel the stones through the thin leather of his sandals as he'd felt it then.
Beside Mark Antony she had asked to be buried; and so it had been done. He'd stood in the crowds, a common man, with his coarse cloak wrapped around him, listening to the wailing of the mourners. '' Our great Queen is dead.''
His grief had been an agony. So why was he not weeping now? He sat in this room staring at her marble bust, and the pain was just beyond his reach.
"Cleopatra," he whispered. Playfully, he envisioned her not as the woman on her deathbed, but as the young girt who had
awakened him: Rise, Ramses the Great. A Queen of Egypt calls you. Come out of your deep sleep and be my counsel in this time of woe.
No, he did not feel either the joy or the pain.
Did this mean the capacity to suffer had been affected by the powerful elixir that never ceased its work in his veins? Or was it something else, that he had long suspected; that when he slept, he somehow knew the passage of time? Somehow even in that unconscious state, he traveled away from the things that had hurt him; and his dreams were only one indication of the reasoning that went on in darkness and in stillness. Without panic, he had known before the sunlight ever touched his body mat hundreds of years had passed.
Perhaps he was merely so shocked by all he'd seen about him in the twentieth century that the memories had not attained their fall emotional force. The pain would return all at once and he would find himself weeping uncontrollably on the edge of madness-unable to embrace all the beauty that he saw.
There had been a moment in the wax museum, yes, when he had seen that vulgar effigy of Cleopatra, and the ludicrous, expressionless Antony beside her, when he had felt something akin to panic. It had soothed him to return to the noisy, bustling London streets outside. He had heard her crying in his memory: "Ramses, Antony is dying. Give him the elixir! Ramses!" It seemed a voice from somewhere outside of him, which he could not silence at will. It disturbed him that she had been so grossly represented. And his heart had been tripping like those steam hammers that broke the cement pavings of London. Tripping. But that was not pain.
And what did it matter that the wax statue had so cheapened her beauty? His statues bore no resemblance to him finally, and he had stood about in the hot sun chatting with the workmen who made them! Nobody expected public art to have anything much to do with the flesh-and-blood model, that is, not until the Romans started filling their gardens with portraits of themselves, down to the very warts.
Cleopatra had been no Roman. Cleopatra had been a Greek and an Egyptian. And the horror was, Cleopatra meant something to these modern people of the twentieth century which was altogether wrong. She had become a symbol of licentiousness, when in fact she had possessed a multitude of amazing talents. They had punished her for her one flaw by forgetting everything else.
Yes, that is what had shocked him in the wax museum. Remembered, but not for what she was. A painted whore lying on a silken couch.
Silence. His heart was thudding again. He listened. He heard the ticking of the clock.
A tray of savory pastries lay before him. There was the brandy; oranges and pears on a china plate. He should eat and drink, for that always calmed him, just as if he'd been starving when he was not starving at all.
And he did not want to feel the agony again, did he? Yet he was frightened. Because he did not want to lose his vast experience of human feeling. That would be like dying!
Once again he looked at her beautiful face, rendered there in marble, more truly Cleopatra than that wax horror. And something deep inside threatened the strange quiet of his mind. He saw images without meaning. He put his hands to his head and sighed.
Of course if he thought of Julie Stratford in her bed above him, his mind and heart would be instantly united. He laughed softly as he picked up one of the pastries-sticky and sweet. He devoured it. He wanted to devour Julie Stratford. Ah, this woman, this splendid woman; this delicate-boned modern Queen who needed no land to rule to make her regal. So wondrously clever and surprisingly strong. But then he had better not dwell on it, or he would go up and knock down her door.
Picture it: crashing into her bedchamber. The poor servant wakes in the attic and starts screaming- So what? And Julie Stratford rises in that lace bower of hers, which he glimpsed earlier from the hallway, and he covers her, ripping off her scant gown, caressing her hot little limbs and taking her before she can protest.
No. You cannot do that. Do that and you destroy the thing you desire. Julie Stratford was worth humility and patience, a great deal of it. He had known that when he had watched her from that strange numb half-awakened state, moving about this library, speaking to him in his coffin, never guessing that he could hear.
Julie Stratford had become a great mystery of body and soul and will.
He took another deep drink of the brandy. Delicious. Another long draw on the cigar. He sliced through the orange with the knife and picked it up and ate the sweet, wet meat of it.
The cigar filled the room with a perfume finer than any incense. Turkish tobacco, Julie had told him. He had not known what that meant then, but he knew now. Ripping through a little book called History of the World, he had read all about the Turks and their conquests. That was how he should start, really, with the little books full of generalities and summations: "Within a century and a half all of Europe had fallen to the barbarian hordes." The fine distinctions would come later, as he sought out the great wealth of printed material in all languages. Just thinking of it made him smile.
The gramophone stopped. He rose, went to the machine and found another black disk for it to play. This one had the curious title "Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage." For some reason that made him think of Julie again and wanting to crush her with kisses. He set the disk on the turntable and cranked the handle. A small fragile woman's voice began to warble. He laughed. He refilled his brandy and moved a little with the music, a slow dance without lifting his feet.
But it was time to do some work. The darkness was dissolving outside the windows. The first faint gray light of the dawn was coming. He could hear, even over the dull roar of the city around him, the faraway song of birds.
He went into the dark cold kitchen of the house, found "a glass," as they called them, these beautiful objects, and filled it with water from the miraculous little copper tap.
Then he went back into the library and studied the long row of alabaster jars under the mirror. All appeared unharmed. No cracks anywhere. Nothing missing. And there was his little burner, all ready for him, and the empty glass vials. All he needed was a little oil. Or one of these candles, burnt down now to a convenient stub.
Moving aside his scrolls rather carelessly, he set up the little burner properly. He slipped the candle into place, and blew out the flame.
Then he studied the jars again. His hand chose before his mind chose. And when he studied the crushed white powder he knew that his hand had been right.
Oh, if only Henry Stratford had dipped his spoon into this instead of the other! What a great shock he would have had. His uncle, a roaring lion, might have torn off his head.
It occurred to him suddenly that though the poisons might have frightened the people of his time, they would be no deterrent to the scientists of his age. A person with a spark of belief could easily have taken all these jars out of here, fed their contents slowly to animal victims, until he discovered the elixir. It would be simple enough.
As it stood now, of course, only Samir Ibrahaim and Julie Stratford knew of the elixir. And they would never divulge the secret to anyone. But Lawrence Stratford had partially translated the story. And his notebook was lying about somewhere- Ramses had been unable to find it-for anyone to
read. Then of course there were the scrolls.
Whatever the case, this situation could not continue forever. He must carry the elixir on his person. And of course there was always the chance that the batch had lost its potency. Two thousand years almost, the powder had lain in the jar.
In that time, wine would have turned to vinegar, or some utterly undrinkable fluid. Flour would have turned into something no more edible than sand.
His hand trembled now as he poured all of the coarse granules into the metal dish of the burner. He tapped the jar to make sure that not so much as a speck remained. Then he mixed it in the dish gently with his finger, and added a liberal amount of water from the glass.
Now he relighted the candle. As it bubbled, he gathered the glass vials and laid them out-the ones that had been on display here on the table, and two others that had remained concealed or overlooked in an ebony box.
Four large vials with silver caps.
Within seconds the change had taken place. The raw ingredients, already quite potent in their own right, had been changed into a bubbling liquid, full of vague phosphorescent light. How ominous it looked, like something that might bum the skin off the mouth of anyone who tried to drink it! But it did not do that. It had not done it when eons ago, he had drunk down the full cup without hesitation, ready to suffer to be immortal! There had been no pain at all. He smiled. No pain at all.
Carefully he lifted the dish. He poured the steaming elixir into one vial after another until all four glass containers were full. Then he waited until the dish was cooled and he licked it clean, for that was the only safe thing to do. Then he capped the vials. And he took the candle and made the wax drip around these caps to seal them, all save one.
Three of the vials, he placed in the pocket of his robe. The fourth vial, the one which he had failed to seal, he carried with him into the conservatory. He stood there in the darkness, holding it, peering at the ferns and vines that crowded the room.
The glass walls were losing their dark opacity. He could still see his own reflection clearly, a tall figure in a wine-dark garment, with a warm room behind him-but the pale objects of the outside world were coming visible too.
He approached the potted fern nearest him; a thing of great airy dark-green fronds. He poured a bit of the elixir into the moist soil. Then he turned to the bougainvillea, whose fragile red blossoms were few and far between amid the dark foliage. He poured many droplets of the elixir into this pot as well.
There was a faint stirring; a crackling sound. To use any more would be madness. Yet he moved from pot to pot, pouring but a few drops in each. Finally half the vial remained. And he had done enough harm, had he not? If the magic no longer worked, he would know within a few moments. He looked to the glass ceiling. The first blush of the sun was there. The god Ra sending the first warm rays.
The leaves of the ferns rustled, lengthened; tender shoots unfurled. The bougainvillea swelled and trembled on its trellis, tiny tendrils shooting up along the wrought-iron grillwork, little blossoms opening suddenly, blood red as wounds. The entire glass room was alive with accelerated growth. He closed his eyes, listening to that sound. A dark deep shudder passed through him.
How could he have ever believed that the elixir had lost its effectiveness? It was as strong as ever it had been. One powerful draught had rendered him immortal forever. Why did he think the substance itself, once created, would be any less immortal than he?
He put the vial in his pocket. He unlatched the rear door of the house and went out into the murky wet dawn.
The pain in Henry's head was so bad he could not even see the two detectives clearly. He had been dreaming of that thing, that mummy, when they awakened him. In cold terror, he had taken his gun, cocked it, slipped it into his pocket and gone to the door. Now if they meant to search him . . .
"Everyone knew Tommy Sharpies!" he said, fury masking his fear. "Everyone owed him money. For this you wake me at the crack of dawn?"
He squinted stupidly at the one called Gallon, who now held up that damned Cleopatra coin! How the hell could he have been so stupid? To go off and leave that coin in Sharples's pocket. But for the love of hell, he had not planned to cut down Sharpies! How could he be expected to think of things like this!
"Ever see this before, sir?"
Be calm. There is not a scintilla of evidence to connect you to anything. Let indignation serve you as well as it always has.
"Why, that's from my uncle's collection. The Ramses collection. How did you get it? It ought to be under lock and key."
"The question is," said the one called Trent, "how did Mr. Sharpies get it? And what was he doing with it on his person when he was killed?"
Henry ran his hands back through his hair. If only the pain would stop. If only he could excuse himself for a minute, get a good stiff drink and have some time to think.
"Reginald Ramsey!" he said, looking Trent in the eye. "That's the fellow's name, wasn't it? That Egyptologist! The one staying with my cousin. Good God, what's going on in that house!''
"Mr. Ramsey?"
"You have questioned him, haven't you? Where did he come from, that man?" His face colored as the two men stared at him in silence. "Do I have to do your job for you? Where the devil did the bastard come from? And what's he doing with all that treasure in my cousin's house?"
For an hour Ramses walked. The morning was cold and dreary. The great imposing houses of Mayfair gave way to the dingy tenements of the poor. He roamed narrow unpaved streets, like the alleyways of an ancient city-Jericho, or Rome. Tracks of the horse carts here, and the reek of damp manure.
Now and then some poor passerby would stare at him. Surely he should not be dressed in this long satin robe. But that did not matter. He was Ramses the Wanderer again. Ramses the Damned only passing through this time. The elixir still had its potency. And the science of this time was no more ready for it than the science of any other.
Look at this suffering, these beggars sleeping in the alleyway.
Smell the filth of that house, as if the door is a mouth that spews its foul breath while gasping for clean air.
A beggar man approached him. "Spare a sixpence, sir, I haven't eaten in two days. Please, sir."
Ramses walked on by, his slippers damp and dirty from the puddles in which he had stepped.
And now comes a young woman, look at her; listen to the cough rattling deep from her chest.
"Want to have a good time, sir? I have a nice warm room, sir."
Oh, yes, he did want her services, so very much that he could feel himself hardening immediately. And the fever made her all the more fetching; she thrust out her small bosom gracefully as she forced a smile despite her pain.
"Not now, my fair one," he whispered.
It seemed the street, if it was in fact a street, had carried him into a great wilderness of ruins. Burnt-out buildings reeking of the smoke, with windows empty of drapery or glass.
Even here the poor camped in alcoves and shallow doorways. A baby cried desperately. The song of the hungry.
He walked on. He could hear the city coming alive around him; not the human voices; those he'd heard all along. It was the machines which awoke now as the dirty gray sky grew brighter and became almost silver overhead. From somewhere very far away, he heard a deep-throated train whistle. He stopped. He could feel the dull vibration of the great iron monster even here through the damp earth. What a beguiling rhythm it had, those wheels rolling on and on over the iron tracks.
Suddenly a spasm of shrill noise threw him into a panic. He turned in time to see an open motor car hurtling towards him, a young man bouncing on the high seat. He fell back against the stone wall behind him as the thing rattled and bumped over the ruts in the mud.
He was shaken, angry. A rare moment in which he felt helpless, exposed.
Dazed, he realized he was looking at a gray dove lying dead in the street. One of those fat dull gray birds which he saw everywhere in London, nesting on the windowsills a
nd on the rooftops; this one had been struck by the motor car, and part of its wing had been crushed under the wheels.
The wind stirred it now, giving it a false semblance of life.
Suddenly a memory, one of the oldest and most vivid, caught him off guard, ripping him from the present, cruelly, and planting him squarely in another time and place.
He stood in the cave of the Hittite priestess. In his battle garb, his hand on the hilt of his bronze sword, he stood looking up at the white doves circling in the sunlight under the high grate.
